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Democracy loves openness, but governments quite often do not. After all, secrecy is usually the politically easier path. So how does a country ensure public transparency, even when it may not seem to be in the best interests of the governing party?

The answer is an access to information law that ensures openness — and a watchdog capable of enforcing it. Canada, sadly, has neither. Our access to information system, which was designed for a pre-digital world, hasn’t been updated in 30 years. And our watchdog has no teeth.

This suited the obscurantist Harper Conservatives just fine. But Justin Trudeau’s Liberals came to power promising a new era of openness, and in short order set up a parliamentary committee to look at giving Canada’s access laws a much-needed overhaul. It was all very hopeful.

How discouraging, then, to see the Liberals, just six months into their mandate, already on the wrong side of a clash with Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault.

At issue is a campaign promise to give the information commissioner’s office important new powers. Under the current system, the commissioner can investigate complaints and recommend that information be released, but she cannot force the government to comply. If she disagrees with the rationale for a refusal to share, she can take the matter to court.

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But in recent years this has become increasingly impractical. In 2013-14, government departments and agencies invoked cabinet secrecy more than 3,100 times to avoid sharing information — a 49-per-cent uptick from the previous year. That’s a lot of potential court cases.

Evidently, the Liberals agreed. They vowed to heed the call of transparency advocates and invest the commissioner with the authority to issue “binding orders” that would force government disclosures. It would be an important move toward transparency. But a proposal the Liberals are now floating would fully undermine it.

The government recently raised the possibility that, under an updated access law, cabinet members would have a veto that would allow them to block the commissioner’s new powers whenever they wanted. In other words, the government now seems to be promising to do much better on openness — unless it decides not to.

Unsurprisingly, openness advocates are beside themselves. Legault suggested that the veto would actually make the new system worse than the old one. It would create an “oversight model that is actually a mirage,” she said. Vincent Gogolek, executive director of the British Columbia Freedom of Information and Privacy Association, was pithier: “We think this is a bad idea,” he told the House committee. No kidding.

Clearly there must be limits to openness. Some sensitive information ought to be kept from public view, whether on national security or matters of personal privacy. But as Duff Conacher, a founder of the group Democracy Watch, told the committee, it should be up to the information commissioner to determine whether an exemption applies “in every single case.”

That’s right. The decision should be in the hands of the information commissioner. And where there’s disagreement, the burden should be on the government, with its significant resources, to make its case to the court.

Good thing the Liberals are merely floating this idea. That means there’s still time to yank it down to earth and bury it. If the government is serious about its much-vaunted commitment to open government, it will do just that.

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